Effect of Parental Migration on the Academic Performance of Left Behind Children in North Western China

China’s rapid urbanisation has induced large numbers of rural residents to migrate from their homes in the countryside to urban areas in search of higher wages. As a consequence, it is estimated that more than 60 million children in rural China are left behind and live with relatives, typically their paternal grandparents. These children are called Left Behind Children (LBCs). There are concerns about the potential negative effects of parental migration on the academic performance of the LBCs that could be due to the absence of parental care. However, it might also be that when a child’s parents work away from home, their remittances can increase the household’s income and provide more resources and that this can lead to better academic performance. Hence, the net impact of out-migration on the academic performance of LBCs is unclear. This paper examines changes in academic performance before and after the parents of students out-migrate. We draw on a panel dataset collected by the authors of more than 13,000 students at 130 rural primary schools in ethnic minority areas of rural China. Using difference-in-differences and propensity score matching approaches, our results indicate that parental migration has significant, positive impacts on the academic performance of LBCs (which we measure using standardised English test scores). Heterogeneous analysis using our data demonstrates that the positive impact on LBCs is greater for poorer performing students.     

Between Russia and a Hard Place: Great Power Grievances and Central Asian Ambivalence

Abstract

This essay asks how Central Asian states have responded to Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and salvos against the West, as a means to assess how Russia and the Central Asian states understand their national interests and exercise state power. It argues that the post-Soviet region shares a cynical and geopolitically driven view of the exercise of global power. Yet Russia has sometimes deployed its resources to advance short-term ideological objectives, whereas Central Asian foreign policy is pragmatic and opportunistic. The Ukraine crisis threatened to coerce the Central Asian states into conformity with Russia’s interests; ironically, their dependence on Russia has enabled their freedom of action in foreign policy, within limits. The essay highlights the ways that geography enables and constrains the execution of foreign policy, and considers the ambiguous role ideology plays in the formulation of national interests and the prospects for international cooperation.     

The Democracy Aid Calculus: Regimes,Political Opponents,and the Allocation of US Democracy Assistance, 1981–2009

To encourage the spread of democracy throughout the developing world, the United States provides targeted aid to governments, political parties, and other non-governmental groups and organizations. This study examines the calculations behind the allocation of democracy assistance, with special attention to the role of regime conditions and policy compatibility in the provision of aid. We argue that both concerns—the opportunity for successful democratization and critical goals related to containing and countering political opponents—are central to democracy aid allocations. We theorize how these two concerns determine the amount of aid allocated, operationalizing these concepts using measures of the original democracy level, change in the democracy level, and policy compatibility. We find support for our argument in tests of US democracy aid allocations by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) from 1981–2009.     

Bound for Glory: The Hostage Crisis as Captivity Narrative in Iran

Eschewing conventional analyses of foreign policymaking during the Iranian hostage crisis, this paper examines how media representations of the crisis (November 1979–January 1981) contained important elements of classic American captivity narratives. Five themes are culled from the secondary literature on captivity stories and are used as categories in a content analysis of mass circulation media such as People Magazine and Time as well as more elite publications such as The New York Times and The New Republic . Depictions of Iranians as "devilish savages," calls to rally around the flag, anxious depictions of the hostages' plight and fears that they will "go native," exhortations to stand firm, and heroic leadership are found to be recurring themes in widely read media accounts of the hostage crisis. The results suggest that captivity stories have a continuing influence on popular understandings of America's mission in the world.     

Environmental issues as a ‘strategic’ key in EU–China relations

EU–China relations face some troubled areas, notably their differing views on human rights and a widening trade imbalance in China’s favour, compounded by the still weak foreign policy coherence on the part of the EU. This raises problems for the EU–China strategic partnership announced in 2003. This paper argues that, in contrast to such problematic political-trade areas, there is some substantive convergence over environmental and energy issues. Convergence is evoked in the EU–China Partnership on Climate Change announced in 2005, and manifested in various cooperative programmes currently operating. In a practical sense, environmental issues are not only important in themselves but are ones where easier confidence and pragmatic cooperation can be more readily established between the EU and China. However, questions of appropriate environmental technology, the commercial/altruistic basis for technology transfer and outcomes of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December 2009 remain as issues to settle between them.     

A Reevaluation of the Effects of State and ACA Dependent Coverage Mandates on Health Insurance Coverage

We study state and federal health insurance coverage mandates for young adults. Despite consistent findings that the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) federal mandate was effective, research has disagreed on whether preexisting, state-level mandates were successful in increasing coverage. We reconsider the issue with a new analytical perspective and newly available accurate data on state mandates. We show that the impact of the state mandates was substantive and concentrated among young adults between ages 19 and 23. Our estimates indicate that dependent coverage rose by 3.9 percentage points and overall coverage rose by 3.3 percentage points. Crowd-out of coverage through young adults’ own jobs was negligible. For those above 23, we find little evidence of changes in coverage. We incorporate these insights into analysis of the ACA's mandate, showing its effects were focused among those who were not eligible for state mandates, or were eligible but older than 23. Our results suggest that eligibility restrictions played important roles in limiting the scope of the state mandates, but they can be practical and effective tools for policymakers looking to ensure or expand coverage for young adults in the face of uncertainty about the ACA.     

Die Wiederherstellung des Marktsubjekts

The UK is generally considered a laboratory for styles of governance influenced by New Public Management: outsourcing, internal markets, targets, auditing. The shifts in governance style, and the new instruments that have accompanied them, were once synonymous with “Thatcherism” but have since been adopted and refined by New Labour. Early critical social scientific analyses deployed the Gramscian notion of hegemony to analyse this shift. This was followed by Foucault inspired analyses of “governmentality”. The latter focused more explicitly on the micro-level of conduct. This article follows that lead, but seeks to address the central puzzles thrown up by this experiment through Max Weber’s conception of a “bureaucratic revolution” and Karl Polanyi’s analysis of the constitution of a “market subject” via a “double movement”: a simultaneous loosening and tightening of control. The Weber-Polanyi approach allows us, we argue, to make the link more explicit between micro-level changes in the “conduct of life” (Lebensführung) and the meso-level instruments designed to bring about such a re-orientation of conduct. The article makes the case with reference to empirical material from a number of public services, notably education and health. Overall, the decisive factor is not a weakening of the state, but a change in its capacities and instruments.     

The British Labour Party and leadership election mandate(s) of Jeremy Corbyn: patterns of opinion and opposition within the parliamentary Labour Party

This paper offers the first systematic evaluation of opinion within the 2015–2017 parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) towards the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. We do this by identifying whether individual parliamentarians remained supportive of Corbyn as their party leader or not, and then relating opinion on this to a series of variables that form the basis of a unique data set on the PLP. By constructing this data set we are able to test, via logistic regression analysis, a series of hypotheses based around (1) demographic variables – i.e. age, gender and trade union membership; (2) political variables – i.e. year of entry, constituency region, marginality, main competition and the endorsement of their constituency Labour Party (CLP) in the leadership election of 2016 and (3) ideological variables – i.e. views on continued European Union [EU] membership, immigration, intervention in Syria and the renewal of Trident.     

Complementarity of additionalities resulting from European Union funds: Perspective of the users of research infrastructures

The goal of this paper is to investigate the complementarity of three types of additionalities: input (growth of R&D investments), behavioral (changes in the internal processes of the entity), and output (leveraging social or private returns), occurring as the result of the 7th Framework Programme and Horizon 2020 European Union funds part INFRA. The empirical contribution is based on results of self-created questionnaires conducted in 2016 with the use of CATI/CAWI on the unique sample of N = 401 users of European Union research infrastructures from 32 countries. We create a Behavioral Additionality Index (BAI), which is a measurement tool that combines eight types (scale, scope, cognitive capacity, challenge, network, follow-up, management, and acceleration) of behavioral additionalities. Based on the results of a logistic regression, we find that there is a positive relationship between input and behavioral additionality, as well as between behavioral additionality and output additionality. This last link, however, is not shown to be strengthened by input additionality. No significant differences in the level of the BAI were found between EU countries based on their level of innovativeness as measured by the Summary Innovation Index (SII), although we can observe that less developed EU countries, as well as on non-EU countries, have higher BAI scores compared to developed ones. The overall results lead to the conclusion that the evaluation of public financial support has to be conducted not only for input, behavioral, and output additionalities separately, but must also take into account their complementarity—with its major focus on the behavioral aspects of this effect.